KEVIN Joyce doesn’t have an Olympic basketball gold medal around his neck, but he’s got one in his heart.

Joyce and his 11 teammates had the gold medal stolen from them in the 1972 Summer Olympics after they beat the Soviet Union, 50-49, in the gold-medal game. The Soviets were given three more second chances after the clock expired by officials, some wearing striped shirts and some wearing suits, before the theft was official, the worst Olympic fix of all time.

Following this year’s skating scandal, where the Russians and Canadians were both awarded gold medals to sweep that scandal under the ice, Joyce’s Olympic teammate, Tom McMillen, a former congressman and Knick and player on the ’72 team, is trying to get the United States Olympic Committee to appeal to the IOC to get his team the gold – 30 years late.

The no-nonsense Joyce will take his gold medal on one account – “I want the [Soviets] to give me their gold,” he told The Post last night from Vermont, where he was on vacation.

“Tom is a nice guy, but he’s a politician,” said Joyce, who starred for Archbishop Molloy and South Carolina. “I would have liked to have talked to him first.”

Joyce doesn’t want any second-rate gold medal as a feel-good measure. He knows his team won that game on Doug Collins’ two foul shots, no matter what the Olympic record book says. The team never accepted their silver medals.

The Iron Curtain fell on the side of the Soviets when a protest was made to the five-man international basketball federation jury of appeal after the game. They ruled against the U.S., 3-2. Italy and Puerto Rico voted to disallow the final do-over Soviet basket. But this was the Cold War and the three votes cast against the U.S. came from representatives of Cuba, Poland and Hungary. The fix was in.

America lost its first-ever Olympic basketball game. And 12 college kids – this was before the days of the Nike Pro Olympics – had their hearts broken.

Joyce, 50, works on Wall Street. He’s given his kids this advice about the search for Olympic gold. “If you want to see a gold medal,” he said, “win one yourself or go to a museum.

“I refuse to take the silver,” the former guard said. “We won that game.”

And he doesn’t want any part of any cheap gold. As a fifth-grader, Joyce wrote that his dream was to make the Olympics. That dream became a reality years later in Colorado Springs.

“I’m telling you, making that team was a war,” Joyce said. “We had 67 guys tryout.”